A happy coda for this build thread: This weekend the Tempest took first in a windy 5-person 3-round WWII Combat at the Texas Scale Champs in Gainesville TX, scoring my first FAC event win. First round was a pretty ugly flight, ending with the Tempest bouncing off the taxiway (literally) at landing, splitting a prop tip and shredding the tissue on the radiator. I came down 3rd of 5 and was still flyable so on to round 2. This flight was better until the freewheeler hung up costing much hard-earned altitude, coming down 3rd of 4. Rich Adam's beautiful Hellcat sailed almost to the edge of the field on a beautiful long flight for round 2, IronMike was unlucky and had a catastrophic inflight wing failure on his venerable Zero. In round 3 I wound a bit harder and almost paid the price - the Tempest torqued over to the left hard, pulling out about four feet above the ground and climbing nicely thereafter. Rich either had a bad launch or some sort of damage and was down first in round 3 - the Tempest hung on just long enough to touch down after Chuck Powell's Hein to take the win. The contest was a great time, with good flying early both days and late in the afternoon on Saturday and lots of great times with great people.

Crappy hat-cam video of the first two rounds here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdQCXRiRkgQ. The cameraman (me) has been fired for failing to start his camera before the round 3 launch... Note the wind noise throughout the video.

Between taxiway rash, broken motors, wingectomies, stooge hits and various other incidents the Tempest is looking pretty war-weary, but I don't care - it's been a great plane.

Mike did th eone thing that wins contests...he didn't give up. I remember when he first brought out the Tempest last year. It was beautiful but needed help to get flying. He has done a wonderful jib with it. It does look like Heck now, but it's been worth it.

Well, yesterday I made the Tempest look a bit more "like Heck". I'd put an 8" Igra prop on it as the modified 7" Sig prop I used at the Outdoor Champs in Muncie last month was very disappointing. Initial flights looked very promising with good climb and a nice cruise. After fixing some minor rash I wound it to 5-1/2 oz-in on my standard 2x22" loop 3/16" motor and gave it a toss. Great climb, started a normal left power pattern, then the breeze shifted and it turned right for about 30 deg heading change and charged out beyond the field, over the parking lot, then cruised nicely over the local big-box store, where it did a right spiral descent onto the roof!

The local security guys were very helpful, got the code, unlocked the roof access and retrieved the model, but as the guy on the roof passed the model to the guy on the ladder it got crunched, folding the fin and breaking the right wing at the dihedral joint. No complaints, I was happy to get the model back and bought them each a 12-pack of their chosen beverage.

As Rich said above, the model has gotten pretty ragged (and heavier) after a couple burst motors and two years of fun and learning. I recently read Roland Beamont's "My Part of the Sky" and had been thinking about re-covering the model and marking it up as his RB Wing Commander aircraft. Yesterday's damage pushed me over the edge and today I stripped the airframe. Plan is to build a lighter set of tail surfaces, sand and trim the model to reduce the aft end weight as much as possible, then re-cover it in printed tissue using flight simulator skin graphics like I did on the Me-262 jetcat. Flying weight with motor yesterday was 65.7g, I'd like to see if I can reduce that by at least 10g. I also want to open up the noseblock area a bit to make using a blast tube and getting the last bit of a fully wound motor in a bit easier. We'll see how it goes...

Sanded off the remaining tissue residue and trimmed/sanded about 1.25g off the aft end of the airframe. Infilled the front end as the tissue up there took a beating from handling the model and landings - I used some firm 1/8" sheet to fill the bottom of the radiator housing, did the rest with very light 1/16" and 1/8" sheet. Had to use a bit of filler over the formers as they had been sanded flat between the stringers before the original covering job. Infill, glue and filler added about a gram back onto the front end of the model.

For the stab and fin I laminated the outlines with 3 layers of light 1/32" sheet (soaked 24 hours before forming it up). That'll need to cure a day or two before breaking it out of the forms.

Cut the larger noseblock well today. I made up a simple jig to hold the fuselage straight and level in the Shopsmith, aligned it, then cut the plug hole to 7/8" and the keeper hole to 1-1/8". To trim the depth of the keeper hole I CA'd a broken-off bit of razor blade into a dowel with a tight-fitting o-ring for a depth stop. Worked like a charm.

Completed frames for the new fin and stab using lighter wood and simpler construction. Previous set was 2.17g before covering, new set is 1.05g, should help the balance a bit. Airframe is all sanded up, just about ready to cover.

This is an interesting restoration Mike, I've got a sharp eye on it. On the face of it I'd say that paring 10g off anything this small would be impossible, but then I'd also have to say that (having built a 1/24 Tempest II) . . .errr. . .nearly 66g flying weight is, err, a bit on the portly side - but I may be comparing apples and oranges: I know that the FAC style of model is likely to have a far greater proportion of its AUW as rubber than anything I build.

If you've saved about 2.5g at the tail that'll be 3 or 4 off the nose so you could be 6 ½g lighter already - that's a huge change. Will you use the same motor or a thinner one, thus saving even more weight for the same number of turns?

Stephen, you are correct that this is one dense model. Wing area is about 78 sq in, so target flying weight at .5g/sq in would be less than 40g. I've been flying it at about .84g/sq in! If I get the weight down to 55g it'll be more like .7g/sq in, still heavy but a bit more reasonable.

The moments on the model are in my favor - 1 gram at the tail should correspond to about 2.85g at the nose. I've already taken about 1.25g off the rear fuselage, and I think I'll get about 1.5g off the tailfeathers. I'm going to go with printed tissue instead of painting the model - from my notes the paint and markings added about 2 grams to the model on the previous iteration. That gets me pretty close to 10g saved.

I'd like to go from 2 loops 3/16" down to 2 loops 1/8", we'll see what the weight comes out to be and whether the smaller cross section will get the model moving fast enough with the 8" Czech prop. My 2x22" loop x3/16" motor weighs 10.75g - a similar length 2 loop 1/8" motor should be about 7.5g, but if I can get away with it I'd probably lengthen the motor to get a longer power run. I opened up the noseblock and the forward formers to give a little more room inside the fuselage as I had encountered binding when I tried 24" motors.

The kit specifies paper for the fillets over the leading edge of the wing and for the exit of the radiator duct. I found that the paper over the radiator duct got folded and mutilated due to handling, so I replaced the forward fillets and duct exit with sheet balsa. With that done it was on to covering.

I'm printing tissue for this one to avoid the weight of paint. I found a nice IL-2 flight simulator skin for Roland Beamont's "RB" and adapted that to provide graphics for the tissue. I chalked the invasion stripes and colored the back of the yellow, red and white in the insignia with colored pencils to make them stand out a bit. Covering the fuselage has been very tedious, as the skins don't have all the subtle curves to make the invasion stripes and panel lines come out straight when applied to the model, but with a bit of sectioning and stretching it's coming together.

Mike, I did invasion stripes on my Herr P-51 and getting them looking right on the fuse especially over and under that big scoop was a trip. What I ended up doing was a quick loose covering job in white tissue, then drawing the stripes with a fine black marker, then removed the tissue, lay it flat and scan it. I did the final detailing in Adobe Illustrator, and all matched up without a hitch. Here is an old patched up Peck P-51. I did it the same way. I have swore off using a computer for graphics a few years ago. While the results are great, its better for eye-hand coordination and for me a better challenge to do everything by hand (practically).

Nice looking Mustang Crabby! The tissue templates work well, I used them for fuselage sections on the Navion and Tigercat. I wanted to take advantage of all the nice surface detail and weathering graphics in the flight simulator skin so I'm kinda stuck with what's in the source graphic.

I know what you mean about computer graphics vs. classic tissue work. Some models just cry out for hand-cut or hand-drawn tissue and ink markings. I enjoy both approaches, but I admit to feeling a bit more satisfaction when a hand-lined spliced and layered tissue covering job comes out well than when it's all been printed up on the computer.

Thought about it every time I looked at the wing, but it didn't seem worth the hassle - it'd all come off right around the cg, and I'd be lucky to get a gram with aggressive hacking. Given that the model is still going to be pretty heavy and with my style of flying it'll need to take some abuse, I decided to leave it as is.

Thanks Pie. The skins only needed about 10% enlargement to match the model, so pixellation isn't bad. You can see it if you look closely at high-contrast color transitions with sharp curves (such as the roundels), but from more than a foot away it's not obvious.

I haven't doped the model yet so I don't have final numbers on the weights. From the original build the tissue, fillets and clear dope added about 5.7g to the model, with paint adding about another 2.2g (the decals and bond paper markings added a bit more on top of that, can't find the amount in my notes). Undoped so far this time tissue and fillets added 5.13g to the model. I'll weigh it again after doping, but I'd guess the finish will save 1.5-2g.

I expect the new tail and what I carved out of the aft end will provide most of the weight savings. The old tail group covered and painted weighed 3.36g, the new tail group covered before dope weighs 1.7g. Just that gram and a half savings with corresponding nose weight reduction should be good for over 6 grams savings, almost 10% off flying weight.

Finished putting the Tempest back together tonight in the hotel at Gainesville. No nose weight required to balance it! Flying weight with 2x22" loops 3/16" rubber is 54.5g, just over 11g lighter than previous configuration. Tomorrow at the Texas Scale Champs we'll see how she trims out and flies.

Here's some pictures of the completed Tempest at Gainesville after putting on the gingerbread and painting the spinner the proper yellow. Weight shown is with the 2x22" loops 3/16" motor, which I used for all my flying there.

Over several flights I worked up from 3 oz-in to 6 oz-in torque (750 turns to ~1100 turns). Up to about 5 oz-in flights looked pretty good, above that things turned into a roller-coaster ride. Probably need to go down to loops of 1/8" or a mix of 1/8" and 3/16" loops.

With the limited time I had to play with the model before the WWII mass launch I stuck with the 3/16" motor. First round was wound to a little over 5 oz-in and went OK, with a good climbout to a nice altitude before the porpoising started. Flight was good enough to get me into the second round, although IronMike did try to take me out by spearing me from behind with his P-40! I survived, and his Warhawk suffered only a broken propeller. I wound to 6 oz-in for the second round and paid the price - didn't get enough altitude to make it through the porpoising and was first one down after about a 20-second flight. No damage, so now I can spend some quality time getting to know the model and tuning the power package.

Video of the Tempest rebuild with trim flights and WWII mass launch at Gainesville TX is up. Post-contest inspection showed that I hadn't got the knot all the way to the back of the motor, and that I hadn't trimmed the rubber ends close enough to the knot. Result was the last inch or so of the motor binding up near the peg, upsetting the balance and spoiling flights when wound to high torques. I'm going to make a couple of motors (more carefully) with cross sections from 1/2" to 3/4" and experiment a bit more to find a good balance between torque and motor run duration.